BORED at Max's Kansas City

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

SO ANYWAY, I am of the opinion that your chosen favourite members of the Velvet Underground sez a lot about you. And if you do not have favourite members of the Velvet Underground, and/or do not know who they are (hello the lex), you hate ramshackle fun. The question as to whether Nico counts also says something about you! I personally think Doug Yule doesn't count either, but that says something about ME.

ANYWAY, in the comments, members of the Velvet Underground in order, from CLASSIC to DUD please.

Thank you!

(Supplementary factoid: once I have had a few beers I can be heard claiming that the Velvets featured both Sterling Clover and Sterling Moss on their books. This is of course classic).

Comments

[koganbot]

I think you guys are not fair to Doug Yule: he's on over half their material, including a whole hunk of truly extraordinary stuff (viz. "What Goes On," "I Can't Stand It," "I'm Set Free," lots more). I'd put Lou first with really no contest. John is good, but as the aforementioned extraordinary stuff shows, they could do it without him. I think Lou and John both brought the noise and drones, and a lot of it was cribbed from the Yardbirds anyway. (I have nothing against people cribbing from the Yardbirds. I wish Led Zeppelin had done it more.) Eno was right that a lot of people who heard the Velvets went and formed bands; problem is that few of these people listened well, so what they heard was "noise" and "darkness" and "grim lyrics" and what they managed not to notice was rhythm & blues and doo-wop and Yardbirds (meaning the percussive guitar rhythms as well as noise and drone) and Motown and Bo Diddley and how Lou and Sterling as guitarists and Lou as singer brought everything to the rhythm, the vocals and the guitars being the rhythm section at least as much as the drums and bass and keyboards were. Lou's said that he's coming out of doo-wop, and I think that among other things it's the rhythmic syllabic interplay of doo-wop that shows up in the Velvets, though since the Velvets mostly only had one singer going at a time the interplay was spread out among singer and instruments. To hear what I mean, listen to the Marcels' "Blue Moon" and then listen to the Velvets' "What Goes On." For that matter (for soul/r&b similarities) listen to the Supremes' "You Can't Hurry Love" and "You Keep Me Hangin' On," the rhythms of the first and the obsessive sound of the second.

I'm guessing that the people here who are low-rating Lou remember what they found irritating about him while forgetting or not realizing how much of the band's overall sounded like was his doing. (And Sterling is the mystery man, since his contribution may well be crucial but it's integrated so much into what Lou's doing on guitar that you really don't know how much of the guitar sound is Lou's and how much is Sterling's.) Unless you basically dislike the Velvets, it's hard not to put Lou at the top.

[koganbot]

"how much of the band's overall sounded like was his doing" = how much of the band's overall sound was his doing.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Have you heard any pre-Velvets Lou (as Louis Reed)? VERY doowop/soul.

I rate Sterling high because the guitar styles Lou gravitated to after that were different, so I therefore infer that Sterling deserves significant credit for that rhythm guitar sound, one of my favourite uses of guitars ever, almost without a lead most of the time.

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

Which Yardbirds Frank (or anybody?) would you say the Velvets borrowed from. I'm sure an ilxer (Sundar?) talked about this.

There's a cpl of strands of 'influence' right? One were bands (like Spacemen 3) who took the drones and the drugs side, the other I know of were acoustic indie bands that took the more 'tuneful' side (which might've included Motown and doo-wop) tho' I never fully investigated that.

[koganbot]

Brief answer: Many many Yardbirds tracks have a rave-up, which is basically a crescendo where the band leaves the song behind and goes into a kind of crescendo, with either a repeating pattern on bass or just the bass going into pound-pound-pound-pound, sometimes many or all of the other instruments joining in unison on the pounding, but also then drums and guitars going into rhythmic variations and embellishments, the lead guitarist sometimes throwing blues licks in but sometimes you'll be hearing one of the two guitars basically just scraping the strings, so using the guitar for percussion. Or then they'll go into fast strumming of the sixteenth or twelfth notes (depending on the key signature), which Lou and Sterling picked up on. Almost any Yardbirds album will have examples of this, and the rave-up can go from several seconds to several minutes. Not only do you hear a lot of these techniques in the Velvets, but in many garage bands that preceded the Velvets, and back in Britain the Kinks would use 'em. (Their version of "Milk Cow Blues," for instance; but even a lot of tuneful-oonful tracks of the Kinks would have drones and mini-raveups.) In doing a brief online check, I'm not finding any video clips of a full-fledged rave-up, but in this clip of a late Yardbirds performance of "Shapes Of Things", virtually every stanza ends with a two-bar mini-rave-up. And the break in the middle of "Train Kept A-Rollin" has rave-up elements, and the last ten seconds of the track is a rave-up (and the Velvets have some tracks whose ending is near identical to this). These'll give you an idea. Jim McCarty, Chris Dreja, and Paul Samwell-Smith were as crucial to the Yardbirds as any of the famous lead guitarists.

As for the two strands of influence you describe, it seems to me that neither strand listened to the Velvet Underground's rhythms or counterrhythms (though I've not recently listened to the Spacemen 3, so I might be wrong there). For those, you're more likely to hear it in early to mid '70s Cleveland bands like Mirrors and Rocket From The Tombs and real early Pere Ubu.

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

Ah, ok - I've not listened to Spaceman 3 in years so thinking again it ws more the drugs side as well as a narcoleptic melancholic feel that runs through a lot of their music. They had a very repetitive side which ws more into plugging La Monte/Hindustani music than what the Velvets were doing.

Strangely enough, just last night, I switched on the TV and caught a few clips of the Yardbirds in this doc on the British R&B scene, as well as a repeat of this old pop show where the Kinks were performing.

Really must get round to early Cleveland stuff that came out of the vaults a few years ago (?)